I know this can't really be done, but I'd like to do what I can to improve our latest audio debacle for the shows we do (pro-bono) for our kids' High School. Those of you who may have read some of my posts over the years know our theatre people just won't let us mic the shows properly so we have to make do with what we have. I'd use shotguns and/or wireless lavs if I could but they won't let us. In this latest case we had four boundary mics on the front lip of the stage, with orchestra behind and performers in front, fed through the theatre's mixer into our Zoom H4n. We set the levels during warm-ups but as we used the loudest levels (full chorus and orchestra really belting it out), the majority of the show, like 95% of it, comes in at about -40dB. The loudest parts are at -6 dB (set by the Auto Levels function on the Zoom during warm-ups but then locked into manual for the actual recording).

It sounds just as awful as you would suspect. The orchestra sounds pretty good but the vocals are thin and boomy at the same time, lots of nasty reverb/echo and only marginally better than the on-cam mics (used really only for sync purposes, but we mix in a little from the back of the house for presence and applause).

I can attach a file but just imagine your worst nightmare and that's pretty much how it sounds.

For the past two weeks, I've been slicing the audio track from the Zoom to bring up the levels during the soft parts, and also playing with the following in Premiere:

--EQ to boost the low-mids (for warmth) and the high-mids (for sparkle), and also using the low-cut (to help minimize rumble) and high-cut (to help kill the hiss a little)

--Compression and limiting to help reduce the dynamic range, bringing the softer sounds up and trying to avoid overloading during the loud parts

--Using a gate to help maybe reduce a little of the reverb.

But the more I do the worse it sounds. Everyone either begins to sound like they are underwater or Auto-tuned robots. I'm probably doing everything backwards or am on the right track but am doing too much.

I'm trying to do all this using the tools in Premiere, because at a certain point it just can't be worth all this effort for so little results, and considering the powers that be don't care nearly as much about this as I do, I'd love to get the sound just this much better.

Any creative thoughts out there? Specifically, what tools and techniques do you typically use to clean up audio like this? Are EQ and Compression the right tools or are there better ones?

For plays I tend to have one mike up close to the stage, this picks up the voices and blows out the chorus. Another mike halfway up the hall, this records the chorus, but loses individual voices. My camera mike picks up all the ambient noise, claps and general hall sounds.

I bring in the video together with audio recorded by the camera and use this as my guide track for the entire production. Next I take the best vocals from mike 1 and the chorus from mike two and place each of them on a new audio track. Now I cut between the three (or four) sound tracks to pick out the best. I keep the camera audio track running but at a lower volume, it produces depth to the sound.

I don't mess about too much with auto dynamics, instead I use gain to bring up or down sections so I get a good sounding track.

It works :-)

I guess I should have mentioned that this is exactly what I'm already doing, mixing the primary audio track from the stage mics (4 mics mixed down while recording to two channels on 1 track) with the on-cam tracks (six more, blended in as needed, always only using the best sound). For example, we'd blend in the cam mics when the performers move into the audience and the stage mics pick up, literally, nothing. I'm just trying to get that primary track to sound better.

Thanks for the tips; it's good to know I'm not the only one doing the mix this way.

Have you considered using a shotgun for the front instead of boundry mics? We used a shotgun with good results. The best results, however, has been when each performer wears their own wireless mic. These are the kids I shot. The first choir was 1 shotgun only, the rest of the shows were 16 wireless mics on performers.
YouTube - HEARTS..Every Child Deserves an ARTS Education! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dja-qjgXinw)

Here is one scene with all wireless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbH0SMMGjRE

A nice sound track, and well recorded. I suspect that 16 radio mikes may be beyond most peoples budgets, especially for school productions. Professional theatre companies may not always allow you to attach mikes to performers, especially for a period production.

Nevertheless, it does work for you and you have produced a great sound track. (Nice footage too, what was it shot on and what settings do you use?)

Those 16 Sennheizer wireless mics belong to the theater, they are available for use by the cast of every production. All cast and orchestra mics were fed to a programmable mixer, and I took a feed from it. The shotgun for the choir is a Rode NTG3. On camera mic NTG3 picked up the audience. Close up camera was Sony EX-1, wide shots was Sony HXR-MC1. White balance was 3200K, preset. I occupied 3 seats in the center of the theater for my two cameras, and shot everything solo, while seated in the audience.

Your expertise has certainly paid off, excellent theatre shots. I presume you used a IR filter on your EX

Really nice videos and they sound great. It'd be great if we could do any of that, but we can't. We were stuck with the boundary mics for this production. I'd never use them if I had a choice. The alternative was no mics at all.

My task now is to make a silk purse out of this sow's ear.

This is my fault because I wasn't specific enough about my questions in my first post. These are great suggestions on miking tools and techniques but they are of more use for future shows. Right now I'd love some advice about what software tools, methods and techniques, if any, can help bring some life back to our crappy sound, if anyone's had some experience doing this because they were forced to record under less than optimal circumstances. I know there are a lot of post-production audio mixing experts out there and I'd really appreciate some advice.

I have to ask, why do they want you to shoot the show yet are so adamant against you doing the sound properly? Don't they underdstand that a decent video that people will want to watch requires both good pictures and good sound? "Theatre people" doing professional stage productions go to extraordinary lengths to make sure the sound is up to par. It's particularly puzzling why they wouldn't let you use unobtrusive shotguns where appropriate.

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and the notion one can make a bad recording sound good by manipulating it in post is one of the great fallacies of the industry.

Why boundary mics also? Why not a couple sets of decent omnidirectional mics? Split them on the sides of the stage with one pointing in and one pointing out on each side. That would work better than boundaries I'm certain. Still not perfect but I'd guarantee it would be better.

I believe a portion of your trouble may be due to mixing 4 mics down to 2 channels, especially if in reality it's 4 mics getting mixed down to one signal that's simply recorded on both tracks of the Zoom.
In either case, unless a skilled operator is manually mixing the 4 mics live, it's going to be muddled sound if all 4 mics are up full all the time.

I'd suggest using one low-noise small diaphragm cardioid mic for the stage (powered by a high-quality preamp or mixer), recorded on one track of the Zoom. And one low-noise cardioid for the chorus, recorded on the second track of the Zoom.

If you use multiple mics to cover the width of the stage, you have to mix them live in order to get the benefit of multiple mics without introducing terrible phase problems from the mics that are further away from the action at that moment in time. Or if you can't mix them live you have to record each mic to a separate track and mix them properly in post.

Why boundary mics also? Why not a couple sets of decent omnidirectional mics? Split them on the sides of the stage with one pointing in and one pointing out on each side. That would work better than boundaries I'm certain. Still not perfect but I'd guarantee it would be better.

Don't quite get how "pointing" a omni would work....

Sorry I have nothing really to suggest here Adam but I do wish someone would actually try to answer your question (which I thought was perfectly clear BTW) instead of telling you how you should have done it.

I have similar situations where I was not able to record audio properly. In one case I ended up with an on-screen apology and subtitles which is what the BBC do when the audio is crap for whatever reason.

I have to ask, why do they want you to shoot the show yet are so adamant against you doing the sound properly? Don't they understand that a decent video that people will want to watch requires both good pictures and good sound? "Theatre people" doing professional stage productions go to extraordinary lengths to make sure the sound is up to par. It's particularly puzzling why they wouldn't let you use unobtrusive shotguns where appropriate.

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and the notion one can make a bad recording sound good by manipulating it in post is one of the great fallacies of the industry.

Steve, that's a great and valid question and I ask myself the same thing with every show. The shows themselves are extraordinary and they used to just hire a guy with a VX2000 to sit in the back, push the button and take a nap. This was completely unacceptable to me so I came in with my gear and have really been able to produce stuff that looks pretty great. But they are adamant that "we are not doing a TV show," only an "archival record" of the show and our mandate is to be invisible. My weakness here is I care about this more than they do. They're certainly happy with our DVDs and are verbally appreciative, but if I died tomorrow they'd likely go back to the old way. In any negotiation, he who cares least, wins.

And after reading your posts and others from wise sound experts over the years, I do know that you can't make bad sound good in post. My goal was just to make it a bit better so it wouldn't suck quite as much.

Stan and Jay, we normally use a mixture of mics on stands and the Zoom at the front of the stage but for this show, a period piece, they wanted nothing visible that would make the theatre look modern. We actually had to move two of our cameras that normally would have been up front to the back and sides, so no audience member during the show could see any evidence we were there. We couldn't even have the Zoom in the pit pointing towards the stage because of the little red LED that's on while it is recording. Apparently the lights on the music stands were not sufficiently contemporary looking to destroy the illusion, but mics on stands were.

Believe me, from the beginning, four years ago, I've been begging for them to let me use wireless lavs on the kids, at least for the Upper School (rejected), then for more and better mics and a proper mixer (not the house mix, which is unreliable at best and is never the same as a recording mix) (rejected) (And did I mention it's kids running everything? They don't have the skills, and they don't care). Hanging mics low the way you might record a symphony orchestra? (rejected.) Our normal system of mics on stands plus the Zoom works pretty well for Choir, Orchestra and Band concerts, but not so much for Plays and Musicals. It's actually quite a beautiful fairly new theatre designed by some big shot sound professional and sounds quite good live, but they don't understand that recording audio isn't the same as listening to it live. Or maybe they do but they just don't care. Leaving all four mics open all the time was bad, but the alternative was worse, because the kid running the board couldn't get it straight which mic was on which bus and EVERY LINE had the first four seconds cut off when he was riding levels. So I begged him just to leave all the mics open all the time for our final taping.

So I still do it because I can't stand the thought of someone else doing an even worse job than I do.

Overnight I did some playing around with Soundbooth with the audio tracks. Sounds experts will howl at this, but there's a setting that basically says "make everything the same volume" and despite my misgivings I applied it and on balance, it helped. Sure, because of those awful boundary mics, every time someone moved a set piece it sounded like a freight train, and every dance number is dominated by the thundering herd of footsteps, but it took care of at least making the softer vocals more audible during otherwise quiet times. Then I applied a preset called Vocal: Increase Clarity, which applied both compression and EQ. It sounded pretty decent, so I rendered those out and added them to the mix.

The problem was it killed the peaks, as you might expect, leading to a bizarre warbly cutting out of the sound if, say, a single piano note was louder than the vocal. So I recalled something that was recommended for a different purpose, which was to lay this heavily compressed track next to the original, which still had the peaks. So I did this, applied a little EQ to the original and boosted the gain on the original by 9 db (it was recorded with peaks at -6 dB), deciding to live with the occasional overload.

Does it sound great, or even good? No. Would anyone who knows anything about sound cringe? Sure. But at least now you can hear everyone, even if it sounds more like FM radio than a live performance.

I can live with that.

Thanks for everyone's thoughts so far, and if anyone has additional advice before I burn this sucker this weekend I'd be immensely grateful.

Sorry I have nothing really to suggest here Adam but I do wish someone would actually try to answer your question (which I thought was perfectly clear BTW) instead of telling you how you should have done it.

I have similar situations where I was not able to record audio properly. In one case I ended up with an on-screen apology and subtitles which is what the BBC do when the audio is crap for whatever reason.

His question was clear but the answer is not because of the simple fact that there might not BE an answer. Given that he has 4 boundary mics at a distance from the sound sources, there's going to be a lot of room "air" in the recorded audio and there are no filters that can remove it. Given that he is mixing 4 mics down to two channels, there are going to be arrival time difference at each mic that, when mixed, will produce phase interactions leading to comb filtering etc which cannot be fixed in post. It may very well be that the raw recording is just about as good as he's going to be able to get.

Adam, I really feel for you! Whoever is issuing the edicts has lost his grip on reality.

Do they light the show by turning up the gas jets? Hell no, they're using lekos and fresnels. They're probably coloring with gels, probably dimming them for different lighting cues. Does anyone object to that anachronism?

When intermission comes, or the show ends, does the audience complain when the electric house lights come up? Hell no. Nobody misses the smell and oppressive humidity of the gas lights.

In summer, do they cool the theatre by having a celler under the auditorium filled with blocks of ice, and vent holes cut in the auditorium floor under the chairs? Hell no, they use electrically powered HVAC. Does anyone complain about that?

You have a psycho on your hands.

For future reference, I think Jay is right about problems mixing four boundary mics. Years ago, I tried micing a Broadway show, just for a tiny bit of reinforcement (it was a legitimate play, and all six actors could actually project, but we needed some fill under the balcony). I learned quickly that boundary mics weren't appropriate for that job. When the actors moved around, the phasing problems were quite obvious. And, as you've noted, footsteps and other stage action were quite noisy, too. I solved the problem by using a number of shotguns mounted on the railing of the orchestra pit (there were no musicians to worry about), aiming them at the places on the set where the action took place, then selectively fading from one mic to another when a scene change or stage direction so dictated. I never had more than one of those mics open at any given time. Unfortunately, that's not an option for you.

I suspect any major change in the future would best be implemented by multi track recording, with a mixdown later.

For action on stage, I wonder if you might get away hanging some choir mics on the upstage side of the first teaser (assuming you can avoid problems from dimmer buzz). Of course that's too close to the action to get a good stereo perspective from one pair, so you might need several mics, aimed roughly at action areas on the set. For overall mix, a pair of choir mics hung 15' or 20' back from the lip, at around the height of the proscenium, might work fairly well, and should be virtually invisible to the audience. None of this will sound like Annie or Phantom (thankfully, IMHO) but it might give you a decent archival recording.

{Alternatively, put five mannequins in the front row center seats, and rig the middle one for binaural. Now that's archival.}

Thinking about your present recording, I do have one suggestion. Create two different stereo mixes: one for musical scenes, and one for dialog.

Treat the dialog track fairly aggressively to get rid of room noise, boominess, etc. Your goal should be to have good intelligibility, even if there's a slight sacrifice in overall frequency response. Listen to the mono mixdown; if necessary make the dialog track mono, to avoid further phasing problems if it's played back somewhere in mono. Ride gain as needed so all the dialog is clearly audible.

Treat the music track for the best possible sound quality... which probably means less treatment, less level adjustment, etc. Then let your final mixdown be a combination of the two, fading from the dialog track to the music track, and vice versa, as the musical numbers start and end. Of course you can't over-process the dialog track; you want "Jimmy" singing to sound like the same person as "Jimmy speaking." Yet performers use a different voice to speak and to sing, so the audience will expect and tolerate a certain amount of difference.

When you think about it, most traditional musical films have dialog recorded on the set with one batch of gear, and the musical numbers recorded in the scoring studio with an entirely different setup. There is bound to be some mis-match between dialog scenes and musical scenes, but the audience doesn't stomp out and demand refunds. So if your final track is a collage of different tracks, it can be quite acceptable if it's carefully and tastefully done.

In one case I ended up with an on-screen apology and subtitles

Great idea... an entire high school musical with no audio, just subtitles. Or perhaps just key in an ASL interpreter in the corner of the screen, and ask the audience to learn to sign.

Greg, thanks for the supportive post and great ideas. I'm not sure I'd classify them as psychos but it's certainly been a challenge. I just think there is a certain degree of territoriality in academia and they're not crazy about a parent who happens to have had a career in this biz intruding into their domain, despite the fact they're getting about fifty grand worth per year of pro bono stuff. Some people give money and we do this. I spent 25 years as a network TV executive and this is my way of giving back and atoning for my sins.

Not surprisingly, it's the newest hire/youngest/least skilled faculty member who is the most problematic. On our very first show, I happened to mention that it was a bit dark onstage and we couldn't promise much, picture wise (this was well before my lovely Z5s) and the dressing down she gave me, including the phrase "creating a theatrical experience," would make your hair curl. Now I just slink in invisibly (with four sizable rigs) and shoot silently.

I grew up in, and spent most of my career time, in LA, where everyone is pretty TV savvy and lots of people want to be in the business and will bend over backwards to help you. Up here in the boondocks, they just couldn't care less.

I like your idea of treating music and dialogue differently, and as it turns out what I did sort of worked out that way. As the dialog tends to be quite low on the lesser-treated track, the more treated one tends to dominate, while the music comes up quite nicely and fills in the shortcomings of the highly processed track.

Steve, as I think I noted in the first line of my first post, I know you're right and we can't expect miracles. But there are dozens of ways to process sound in all the software packages out there, and they all do something, and presumably at least some of them can affect audio in ways that make it sound better. I was just hunting for some ideas. As it turns out, the final mix isn't too bad and I'm the only one who considers it sub-par. Well, you guys would too, but the civilians who get our DVDs realize they are several orders of magnitude better than the ones they used to get before I started doing this, and are all pretty nice about it.

My youngest is there until 2018. Maybe by then they'll let us mic up the place properly.

Great idea... an entire high school musical with no audio, just subtitles. Or perhaps just key in an ASL interpreter in the corner of the screen, and ask the audience to learn to sign.

Ha ha! No, that's not what I did, and it's not what the Beeb do either. The idea is to give the audio postproduction your best shot (some good ideas here now like your suggestion of music and dialogue mixes) and only where the intelligibility of dialogue is in question add the subtitles. It wasn't a whole school show that I had to do this for, it was for much shorter extracts. A lateral "solution" obviously.

For the small theatre I do most of my school recordings in now, I have a trick which works well, at east for the stage area. There is a very conveniently placed and electrically raised/lowered projector screen mounted over the front of the stage. I attach Sennheiser G2 radiomic trnsmitters by taping to the bottom rail and hanging MKE 2-ew Gold mics down from them over the front of the stage. These are invisible to the audience and do a pretty good job when properly mic placement can't be done - usually in my case because its a last minute request to record something (don't get me started on that topic).

I think we all know here that there is no substitute for proper mic choice and placement.

and only where the intelligibility of dialogue is in question add the subtitles.

No, really, you should subtitle the whole play. In fact, during the musical numbers, instead of static subtitles, you could use the "bouncing ball" effect and the viewers could sing along. It it weren't so time consuming, I'd at least produce one copy like that, and give it to the young genius who doesn't want any mics used.

....Steve, as I think I noted in the first line of my first post, I know you're right and we can't expect miracles. But there are dozens of ways to process sound in all the software packages out there, and they all do something, and presumably at least some of them can affect audio in ways that make it sound better. I was just hunting for some ideas. As it turns out, the final mix isn't too bad and I'm the only one who considers it sub-par. Well, you guys would too, but the civilians who get our DVDs realize they are several orders of magnitude better than the ones they used to get before I started doing this, and are all pretty nice about it.

....

Oh, I don't doubt that audio processing in post can make reduce some of the problems, just that the handicaps you're saddeled with gives you a starting point that doesn't have much to work with, making it hard to get it very far up the ladder.

I'd wager the teacher that reamed you about wanting to diminish the "theatrical experience" has never HAD a theatrical experience in a major theatre town like New York, London, or Toronto.

... the handicaps you're saddeled with gives you a starting point that doesn't have much to work with, making it hard to get it very far up the ladder. Granted and stipulated, your honor. But I guess I was hoping you could give your thoughts on... what would you do if you found yourself in this situation, just to get a couple of rungs up the ladder. I have a hunch you wouldn't throw up your hands and say nothing could be done. I'm guessing you're too much of a perfectionist to let it stay as is.

But anyway, I'm happy with what I was able to achieve. Just to close the loop on this, here's the post by Jon Fairhurst in another thread with an idea for solving a different problem, which was the idea I used to help out my tracks:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/all-things-audio/494174-filter-voice-over.html#post1636115

So thanks, Jon. You helped me out of a jam without even knowing it.

Have you tried this? ... You said you have miced the stage with 4 boundary layer mics and you're mixing them down to 2 stereo tracks while recording, right? You might consider working out your recording devices so you can record each mic on its own isolated track and forgo altogether mixing on the fly. Because of the differing distances from a given source to each mic, each particular sound arrives at each mic at a slightly different time. Mixing them directly means you're mixing waveforms that are slightly out of phase with each other, inducing comb filtering that makes the already bad situation worse. Rather than mixing all 4 down to 2, treat the sound from the stage as mono, while in post panning from one mic to another as the sound moves around, only using the track from the one mic that has the best rendering at any point in time without mixing in the other channels.

I agree with that, Steve. That's why I suggested, for future events, that he record multi-track and mix later.

However, that doesn't help with the present mixing problem. Actually, I get the impression that Adam has reached some level of satisfaction for now. After all this discussion, I'm rather curious to hear how bad or good it actually sounds...

For the future, I am torn about making the dialog mono vs. stereo. On the one hand, "real" films have mono dialog, which avoids problems with phase cancellation etc.; but that assumes a clean track to begin with. On the other hand, recording and playing in stereo can sometimes help intelligibility, because it sometimes lets the brain decode the stereo information and "tune in" on the desired sound (the dialog). This "brain filtering" works best with binaural recordings played in headphones, and it somewhat sacrifices mono compatibility. So I hope Adam can prevail and get a better miking situation next time around.

I wonder whether his high school has an old set of footlights, which might be unused presently. If so, that would be a good place to hide a few mics.

Now if I owned that school, I'd drill a bunch of 3/8" holes along the lip of the stage, and stuff them with Panasonic electret capsules. Of course I'd need to get down under the stage to run the wires... minor detail. However, there would be massive problems with impact noise. In reality, I think multi-tracking with hidden choir mics is the best solution given his constraints.

As Greg very correctly noted, all these recording tips are interesting and well-intentioned, but I already know all that stuff -- I've been well-schooled by Steve and others in the many other threads I've posted about miking techniques -- and if I could have done any of it, I would have. But I couldn't then and likely never will be allowed to. Believe me, on my list of the five best ways to mic this sucker, the way we did it isn't even in the top ten. And phase issues were the very least of our problems. In the future we can put mics on stands as we've done in the past -- it just wasn't an option this time. Greg, which specific "choir mics" would you recommend?

Ironically, in replicating an old-time theatre, they actually built some very nice footlights for this production, but they were actually being used as footlights so no room for a mic. The nerve.

In a way, by tweaking the audio we got to be at least minimally acceptable, I may have undercut our argument that we need permission to properly record in the first place. Oh, well.

Greg, if you're really a glutton for punishment, shoot me your email and I can send you some samples. The one-minute wavs I pulled are a little too big to post here.

Adam:

I just stumbled onto this thread this morning. Had I found it earlier, I would have recommended the the techniques described in the Jon Fairhurst thread. I have been using variations on those for for more than a decade of shooting in circumstances like those your describe. From that experience, I offer some additional suggestions that may or may not help.

One trick I've used when the recording levels were low is to double or triple the tracks. In PPro, I've found that this can make quiet recordings seem louder without getting the noise or distortion that might otherwise result if you simply boosted volume levels. I'm not sure why this works but I have found that it can help a lot.

If you had any centrally located mikes, PPro and Soundbooth (dynamically linked) can sometimes help things along by doubling the track, applying the fill-right effect to one and fill left to the other, and adjusting the panning in the audio-mixer pan controls.

You mentioned that the room sound seemed very good during the performance. You also said something about having a couple of cameras to the sides of the room. Have you checked the audio tracks from your cameras?

Maybe they got audio that can help fix up the sound when properly panned and mixed in. If you mix the room sound with the stage sound recorded by your H4, and judiciously adjust the panning (left cams to the left, right cams to the right), you may be able to fill holes.

I think I recall you using Sony Z5s or FX1000s. If there was house amplification, maybe you had a camera close enough to a loudspeaker to get usable audio without a lot of audience noise.. Since these cameras have have audio limiters (as opposed to the more common audio AGC) you may able to use that audio to patch around or paper over overloads and clipping in the stage audio recorded to the H4.

Again, you will want to work volume levels, pan controls, and and fill-right/fill left audio effects. For example, if you had a camera on the left side of the room. and you were recording with the on-board stereo mike, one channel may be better than the other. Maybe the left side of the camera was too close to the wall and picked up the wrong reverbs, but maybe the right channel was getting pretty good room sound. Could be vice versa, too. Maybe the right channel got all the audience paper noise, babies, talking etc. while the left channel got cleaner sound.

Obviously, there will be some phase differences. Depending on the distances from the stage, you might be able to adjust for this in PPro by sliding the camera tracks a frame one way or the other relative to the on-stage tracks. You can go into soundbooth and make finer adjustments and produce a tereo mix to import back into PPro.

Although it does not help you fix you last project, for the future, I suggest taking advantage of your multi-cam shooting set-up and use it to improvise "multi-track" recording by dividing the mike and audio feeds between your cameras and devices. This gives you more to work with. Of course, there are times when having more to work with is simply more to work with and a pain. At other times --- in the kinds of situation you described ---- it gives you the material needed to deal with the vagaries of the staging.

A final observation: This kind of event shooting can never be as as good as the kind of PBS/BBC broadcast production we have in our minds when we go to do these things. The reality of shooting momentos for the parents and grandparents is that audio which we think of as just above terrible is often far superior to what they would otherwise get with their iPhones, flip cams, etc. that it is more than good enough. When the parents (and grandparents etc.) play the DVDs, they want to be able to see and recognize their children's faces Pleasing that audience is the object of the production. We have to keep reminding ourselves of that.

Hey Jay! Great to have you in on this discussion.

Appreciate the tips. We always use all the audio from the cams as well as from the Zoom and mix them to get the best sound, presence, audience and the like. We usually have two cams up front and off to the sides and the on-cam mics on the Z5s are actually pretty good. We often mix this audio in with that from the Zoom and the stage mics to get a really nice mix. But for this show, those two cams were in the back corners of the theatre and so thoroughly useless.

Our two center-rear cams helped a bit, especially when the performers were up in the aisles where there were no mics at all. They're good for applause but not much else, usually.

I like the idea of doubling or tripling the tracks. I'm also wondering if making one or more of the tracks a frame or two out of sync might help make the sound fuller. Will have to try that next time.

Thanks again for the advice.

I don't know if you're done with your project or not, but I think an app that would help you now and in every production, is iZotopr RxII. it's magical the way it can remove rumble. And if you recorded at -40db, there is probably some hiss present after bringing it up in level. RX removes hiss better than most. Any videographer who deals with sound should have this. You just open it up and throw the file on, and you can see the full spectrum of sound and easily see the sounds you don't like, select and delete. I'll drop a couple demo vids:

YouTube - iZotope RX 2: Advanced Explained (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8aJ0femYGM)
YouTube - iZotope RXII intro (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VySb5Ychs5U)


Then after you've cleaned up the crud off the tracks, you bring them into your DAW. For the most part you set up an EX and a Compressor on every channel. Just try to sculpture a decent voice sound, and slap a 4:1 ratio on the compressor, and set the threshold to not trigger on the quietest dialogue, then pump the make-up gain. If you cleaned your tracks well the hiss shouldn't get any worse than it originally was when pumped, but then you can use a graphic EQ to make a little spike pointing down, then drag it around until you find the hiss. Just minimize it, don't try to totally remove it.

Then after you get a reasonably even mix through cutting clips and adjusting levels, you can either bounce out a "MIX" file, and master it in another app, or as I have been doing on projects is popping iZotope Ozone, a very sweet mastering plug, into the FX section of the Master bus. In Ozone you can further smash the entire mix (tastefully of course) with a maximizer to get a more even overall level, while applying EQ, Multiband Dynamics, and other mastering tools. But if you don't know what you're doing, they have a lot of presets. You find one that gets you close, then tweak it. Again, it's like magic. But it's best to make sure your mix is done. The Ozone is the icing on the cake. But when you put it in the master bus, rather than bouncing out a stereo file and mastering that (which is the more common approach to mastering), in the master bus you have the luxury of making small tweaks to the mix without rendering a long stereo file every time.

Maybe you don't have the scratch for all that software at the moment, but for future projects I'd suggest them both. I use Ozone with Cubase, and man what a great combo. I use RX stand alone. I can even just drop the video file on it (if my audio is in-cam) and RX makes a wav file, named the same as the video file, so they appear next to each other in the finder.

Even without the RX, I cave you some of my methods that you only need EQ and Compressor for. Then you could put a maximizer only (if you have one) in the master bus and you'll be able to boost the levels while not clipping. With proper compression and limiting(maximizing) you don't need to cut out as many clips to micro-tweak volumes.

Hope that helps.

Chadfish

PS
And if the company is not reasonable enough to even have a discussion about allowing mics, even with your assurance that you would hide the mics, and tape your LEDs, I would say "screw them" and not do them any favors. I'm sure another playhouse would appreciate you trading free video in exchange for you getting to hone your craft. Then you sell them on the idea of all the cast agreeing to buying a DVD for 20 bucks, which would pay for your services (in the future, after you got a work-flow down). With the cast and crew doing that for friends & family you can actually make it worth your while.

Chad, this is great. Thanks for the suggestions. Sounds like a tool that should definitely be in my kit.

Appreciate the advice.

Adam,

I have dine sound for a theater group for a couple of years and this is what works for us when we record. First you need to think in terms of two completely separate sound systems - one for sound reenforcement, this is what is used so the audience can hear the actors- and then a second system that is the audio feed for the recording. If you think about it they have completely different goals. For sound reenforcment the audience hears both the actors/orch live plus what comes out of the sound system. When you record this signal you only get the sound system and it is not properly balanced.

The boundary micas work okay for the first case as they as just filling in, but sound terrible on their own. So my suggestion is to let the stage use whatever micas they need, and then set up your own for recording. We usuall put 2-4 shotguns across the stage, a couple of cardioids above the orch, and maybe another stereo pair out in the audience. We do this on a Thursday night show where attendance is lower. We also then take two channels out of Tuesday's board. One gets the omnis, choir mics, etc - any area type mics. The other carries only solos from those on wireless.

These are all fed into a separate board and mixed live while we record. We are just a local theater so budget is always tight. We have a hodge-hodge of equipment and wireless mics. My crowning glory was to get 28 wireless running at the same time with no feed back and relatively good service!

Adam,

I listened to the clips you sent, and I think you've done a fine job of mixing, compared to the original tracks! The boundary mics sound fine with the orchestra. The only disappointment is that the solo vocalist could stand to be a bit stronger, and that's beyond your control. Adding in the house/camera mics, as you did, adds the chorus, which was largely missing from the boundary track. If the dialog sounds as good as the music, all your efforts were worthwhile. (For some reason, all the tracks seems a bit thin to me... not sure what that represents.)

The final mix sounds much better than I'd expected, based on your pessimistic description. I'm sure the cast and their families will be very happy to have a copy of that.

Of course it's not quite a broadway cast recording. Recording a live performance, with the constraints on miking that you had, makes things pretty tough.

As far as choir mics (or any mics) there are a few considerations, as I'm sure you realize.

I'd start with stereo pair back above the audience, but not too far back. Perhaps hang them out of the ceiling below the FOH lights. I'd use A/B cardioids, spaced a bit (maybe a foot or two) because of the distance, and try to aim them at the playing area. Try to hang them low enough so they'll reach upstage, but of course keep them out of the audience sightlines. With luck those would be your main pair and should get a pretty good mix of all the music. I'd be inclined not to scrimp on these. Of course these do not need to be choir mics, if your head prima donna will allow you to have something more visible.

I have to ponder the closer mics a bit. Choir mics have some advantages, but you have to be careful because they are pointed down at the floor so they pick up a surprising amount of footsteps and other floor noise (sometimes boundary mics are actually better). If I could hang several, overlapping the playing area, I might be tempted to try omnis, because the sound wouldn't change off-axis as the actors move around. I would probably try to use these for dialog, the plan being to keep only one live at any given time, depending on where the stage action is taking place. Think "mono dialog track" as per commercial film/video production. (This presupposes that you can record multi-track and mix down later.) They could hang just upstage of the teaser or borders, depending on where the playing areas are.

Countryman makes choir mics, but I've never been fortunate enough to use them, so I don't know their particular characteristics... of course the company has a good reputation. Shure is a less expensive source. I've had experience with a number of reinforcement systems that use the AudioTechnica mics, and they've been quite satisfactory. Given that these will be primarily dialog mics, these would probably serve you adequately. With this last production, at least, placement was more important than quality of the individual mics, and this video is for "home consumption only," so I think it would be safe to start with these as dialog mics. To put it another way: I think a bunch of these, in the right places, might give better results than a few really good mics in the wrong place.

Of course if money is no object...

No matter how you slice it, you are certainly getting yourself into a major project here. Plan for a lot of time recording rehearsals. And good luck!

Thanks again, Greg! I agree the vocals are thin and I guess that's what happens when your performers are ten feet from the nearest mic. I may add a little more low end EQ and try the 'slightly out of sync' trick to fatten the sound up a bit.

John, if you read back a bit in this thread (as well as any others of mine you might find in this subforum) you'll see that we're exactly on the same page -- I usually tell the same thing to people who contemplate or are advised to try to take a feed from the board. We normally do try to mic the way you've described but most of our attempts have been rejected. Still, thanks for the input, so to speak.

Adam,

As far as thinness, are those tracks flat, or did you happen to roll off the low freqs at all? I would have expected to hear more boominess and fullness from the room (which, of course, might not have been good).

I would use the "slightly out of sync" trick carefully. If your two tracks are a few samples apart, you can create some comb filtering which will do strange things to the frequency response. When you reach 1/30 of a second or so, you will create a perceptible echo which will probably be bad for articulation. Don't overdo it.

Disclaimer: This is a philosophical response, not a technical one.

Sorry, but if "they don't care" then why should you? You can't push a wet noodle. Call the guy back with the camcorder. I got into video because of the deplorable state of audio for video. And after several decades, I am beginning to understand why it is the way it is. Your story is repeated around the globe, even for higher-end productions where people just don't (or won't) understand what it takes to get good audio. I am turning down productions just because they don't want to do it right and it isn't worth the aggravation to fight with them. In some cases, it took some "tough love" to get their attention about the problems. (Most of which are self-imposed.)

Adam,

As far as thinness, are those tracks flat, or did you happen to roll off the low freqs at all? I would have expected to hear more boominess and fullness from the room (which, of course, might not have been good).

I would use the "slightly out of sync" trick carefully. If your two tracks are a few samples apart, you can create some comb filtering which will do strange things to the frequency response. When you reach 1/30 of a second or so, you will create a perceptible echo which will probably be bad for articulation. Don't overdo it.


Agreed. I was only suggesting this as a quick and dirty stab at fixing the divergence between the sound from the on-stage-mics and that from the mics on or with the cameras in the back of the venue. This divergence will be apparent when displaying the waveforms in PPro's audio tracks. When you have the video tracks synched, the waveforms peaks for the back-of-the-hall mics will be slightly behind those of the front of the hall mics. (Take a zoomed-in-video of somebody speaking on stage and the tracks from the back-of-the=hall mics will be a bit behind the lip movements.) This can be fixed by multi-tracking in an external audio editor, but before going that route, I first try sliding the back-of-the hall tracks to try to get the waveforms to match up better to those of the on-stage mics (such as Adam's boundary mics, in this case). Then, listen. If the sound is now clearer and good enough for what you are working on, you are done. If not -- or if moving the tracks around has just created different problems --- then you take the audio tracks out out to an external audio editor where you can make finer adjustments in a multi-track mix.

Good points all. Premiere has a "chorus" effect that adds a little delay, which might be better than sliding a track by a whole frame. Perhaps there's a way to do this that doesn't make it sound like multiple people. I did in fact add a low-cut filter in EQ to help minimize rumble -- will have to tweak that a bit. Maybe roll it off below 50Hz but boost around 100Hz?

As to why I still do this, as I said above, it's because I can't stand the idea of someone else doing it worse. As long as I still have kids involved in this, I want the DVDs to be watchable. And by doing this I am hoping to expose our business to the many high-end corporate parent-types who are at our fairly-well-off school, but so far no business has come from it. There are a lot of politics involved here as well, but I haven't gone into all the details because they are, quite frankly, really boring and irrelevant to this discussion. But I am indeed this close to punting on the whole thing.

I'm now rethinking the idea of choir mics and miking from above, not only because of the thundering footsteps we'll get from the floor, but because of the potential reflected sound as well. I like the idea of going back to the cards and hypers on stands as they point up and into the air. I can always add reverb but I can't take it out -- I know that much.

Adam, I had suggested choir mics originally as a type of "invisible" mic you could use given the present year's restrictions. Of course they're best for a real choir, because a real choir is standing still.

In any case I think I'd want to have a good stereo pair, located as well as possible. That would probably be on a tall stand 15' or 20' beyond the lip of the stage, back into the house. That would certainly be visually obtrusive, so another option is to hang a pair back there.

As far as solo voices, the best alternative is to nail everyone's shoes to the floor, and place mics appropriately. Once people start moving around, it gets dicey.

If it's a stage play (i.e. not a musical, some mics on stands, in the pit but close to the lip, pointed toward stage action areas, would be ideal.

But if you have an orchestra playing in the pit, that kills the idea of also having dialog mics in the pit. Unless you can have visible mics on visible stands, up on the stage, then you're pretty much back where you were this year. "Invisible" means either choir mics, or boundary mics, (or the rare opportunity to use a plant mic), and each has its own set of problems. Of course the deck should be solid and not too resonant, and actors should wear quiet shoes... but you don't always get that lucky.

Certainly putting mics out in the house, below sightlines, and aiming them past the orchestra will not work.

I'm starting to think that I don't really see "the big picture" concerning future events, maybe that's why I'm waffling around a bit. Anyway, it seems you're over the hump with this year's mix, so congratulations on that score.

For plays I have shot I can get away with 3 mics (as long as nobody walks out to the audience to deliver lines). I put a Rode NT-4 stereo mic front and center, at the lip of the stage, pointing up abut 45 degrees. Then I put a mic (Rode NT3 or NT55) on each side of the stage, pointing inward about 45 degrees and upward the same. With that kind of setup, and small mic stands the mics are very low profile, but could be made even more so with a black felt blind of some sort between the mic and the audience. But again that's only possible with a reasonable stage manager.

Thanks, guys. This is great info. Rather than drag this thread further off topic I'll post links to my other two threads (in which Chad has already been quite helpful) where we discuss all of this in detail:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/all-things-audio/488823-nice-all-around-mics-zoom-h4n.html

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/all-things-audio/332883-decent-stage-show-setup-opinions.html

I played around with the existing tracks a little more and the Chorus effect didn't help much and just made it sound weird, which I'm sure is no surprise to you. So I went back to EQ and created a smooth +10 dB, 2 octave hump around 275 Hz and that seemed to help the voices sound a bit fuller, but also made things sound a little dull. So I built another smooth peak around 6600 Hz and that added back a bit of sparkle. The Premiere EQ panel is cool for this as you can just drag stuff around until it sounds right, or at least "righter." The effect is subtle but seems to be a bit better. As Greg noted, this will never be an OBC CD.

So I'm going to call it good at this point, wash my hands and walk away. You can go crazy tweaking this stuff. I'm burning a test BD now to see how it actually looks and sounds on an HDTV/HT with decent but not great speakers.